This invention relates to telecommunications, and in particular to the evaluation of the condition of a telecommunications network infrastructure.
In information/communications technology (ICT), utility computing relies on on-demand provisioning of resources to deliver software, platforms, and networked infrastructures to customers, typically on a pay-as-you-use model. This concept has been facilitated by the emergence of the cloud computing paradigm, and the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market deals with the on-demand provisioning of networked infrastructures, known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). To successfully deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service with high Quality-of-Service (QoS), infrastructure providers must deploy intelligent and cost-effective monitoring frameworks that ensure accurate and up-to-date visibility of operational properties of the resources in the underlying cloud infrastructure i.e. compute, storage, and network resources.
It is known, for example from U.S. Pat. No. 8,874,732 (Sukumaran) to compare real data with a simulator using past data to identify rogue results. However, this relies on prior measurements being a reliable predictor of current conditions, as may be the case in monitoring properties such as data or energy usage by end users, for auditing of billing software etc. This may identify abnormal activity on the account, but assumes that the measurements themselves are reliable.
This invention applies to the deployment of disparate monitoring technologies and approaches in a networked infrastructure. This is a key research and innovation area as the Internet and other networked applications and services have become increasingly important in our everyday activities.
It is common practice for infrastructure providers to deploy a number of disparate monitoring technologies to observe the same properties of a single resource type. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the underlying cloud infrastructure may have resources from multiple vendors with customized implementations of standardized monitoring protocols or with proprietary monitoring technologies. Secondly, it allows for a more robust monitoring framework to be deployed, such that the infrastructure provider always has a means to capture an up-to-date view of the operational properties of its resources. Thirdly, it ensures a cost-effective monitoring framework, as one monitoring technology could be more accurate compared to other deployed technologies, but also more operationally expensive, and therefore deployed less widely.
The deployment of a number of disparate monitoring technologies to observe the same properties of a single resource type could be based on a simultaneous configuration where each technology is operational at the same time. It could also be based on a complementary configuration where each technology is operational in different ways. Infrastructure providers tend to deploy a combination of active monitoring where probes actively poll resources for information, passive monitoring where information is obtained by monitoring the applications running on the resources in the infrastructure, and through estimations that are based on theoretical models. Infrastructure providers receive the most accurate information from active monitoring approaches; however, this is the most expensive approach, and also the most intrusive approach as the monitoring probes tend to compete with customers for resources e.g. monitoring traffic competing with customer traffic for capacity in network links.
It is known, for example from U.S. Pat. No. 7,401,012 (Bonebakker) and EP2555470 (Thomson) to characterise a computer system workload by coordinating a number of independent measurement inputs. However, as the individual measurements relate to different, independent, properties the resulting output is only as reliable as the individual measurements from which it is derived.
The present invention is particularly focused on determining the accuracy of information generated by disparate monitoring technologies that are observing the same operational properties of resources in the networked infrastructure. It ensures the service provisioning logic only attempts to deliver services from the pool of resources which have accurate and up-to-date information of operational properties.
It is known to synchronise the operation or deployment of active network probes to avoid interference between them, and to balance the use of active and passive monitoring in such a way that the intrusiveness of active monitoring is minimized, but the accuracy of measurements is not compromised.
However, these approaches are directed primarily to coordinating the number and activity of probes. There is therefore a requirement for infrastructure providers to validate the accuracy of the information received from active, passive, and estimation approaches. This becomes even more pertinent for deployments where these approaches are operating in a simultaneous configuration, as different measuring techniques may have different levels of accuracy or systematic errors.
The present invention is to validate the information that has been generated by disparate monitoring technologies, which have been deployed by an infrastructure provider to observe the same operational properties of resources. Instead of the measures of a given network element using the various techniques simply being collected and processed independently, they are collated into a single, more reliable measure. Our invention focuses on establishing the accuracy of the information generated by monitoring technologies and validating the trustworthiness of deployed monitoring probes.
The present invention is able to function in a network infrastructure that uses both active and passive monitoring, and also estimations based on theoretical models. It focuses on establishing the similarity between the information generated by disparate monitoring technologies as a means of validating the accuracy of the generated information and also as a means of updating the infrastructure provider's view of reliable monitoring probes.
The present invention accordingly provides, in a first aspect, a method for determining a measure of reliability of one or more individual monitors that concurrently measure a predetermined property of a predetermined resource in a network, by taking a reference measurement from a first monitor, taking one or more further measurements using further monitors, computing a metric of the degree of similarity between the reference measurement and the further measurements, and deriving values for reliability of the monitors from the similarity metric.
The present invention accordingly provides, in a second aspect, a networked component adapted to determine a measure of reliability of one or more individual monitors that concurrently measure a predetermined property of a predetermined resource in a network, having a reliability computation engine for determining a reliability measurement for a property of a resource, having measurement receivers by taking measurements from a plurality of monitors, a comparator for determining the difference between a reference measurement and each of the further measurements, and a reliability value generator for deriving a reliability value for the measured property of the resource from the said differences.
The invention can be integrated into any resource or service provisioning system such as a cloud service orchestrator, networked service broker, or network resource provisioning system. It exposes an intelligent framework that validates the accuracy of monitoring information by computing a metric called the Weighted Similarity Percentage (WSP); this metric is used to compare the information received from disparate monitoring technologies.
In this way the invention is enabled to determine the reliability of disparate monitoring technologies and also to validate the accuracy of information received from these technologies. The service provisioning logic uses the WSP to identify the most appropriate subset of resources in the networked infrastructure to deliver high-quality Infrastructure-as-a-Service to customers. The invention also exposes functionalities to periodically determine the trustworthiness of monitoring probes in the networked infrastructure. The state-of-the-art in the area of networked infrastructure monitoring is mainly focused on methods to optimize the operation of active monitoring of resources i.e. prevent collisions between active probes in the networked infrastructure, reduce the overhead of active probing by leveraging more sophisticated passive monitoring techniques, and methods for intelligently and dynamically distributing active probes across the cloud infrastructure.
The present invention accordingly provides, in a third aspect, a computer program element comprising computer program code to, when loaded into a computer system and executed thereon, cause the computer to perform the steps of the method set out above.
A preferred embodiment of the present invention will now be described, by way of example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which: